The tour, which will run from October 27 to November 8th, will feature private, guided visits to anatomical museums and anatomical theatres throughout Italy. Sites to be visited include “La Specola” (see above images) and the Museo di Anatomia Patologica in Florence, the anatomical wax museum "Museo delle Cere Anatomiche" and the Teatro Anatomico (Anatomical Theater) in Bologna, and the Teatro Anatomico housed in Palazzo Bo in Padua. Also included will be a walking tour of Venice focusing on the significance of this city during the life and career of Andreas Vesalius, viewings of art and architecture masterworks and guided historical walking tours in each city visited, and, throughout, the company of like-minded art-anatomophiles.

If you have been wanting to visit some of these museums but have not yet had a chance, I can think of no better way than this tour, led by experienced (she has given similar tours in Paris, The Netherlands, and Great Britain), enthusiastic, and incredibly knowledgeable Marie, and in the company of like-minded individuals. If I could afford it (and I'm still trying to figure out how and if I might be able to do so...), I'd be there in a second!

You can find out more about the trip itinerary and registration information by clicking here. For more on Marie's upcoming lecture at Observatory, which will discuss the "La Specola" wax anatomical models at length, click here. For more on the Vesalius Trust, click here.

Friday, March 27, 2009

When in Paris last week, I stumbled upon the wonderful Librairie Alain Brieux (mentioned in this previous post). This antique store/rare book shop had a number of extraordinary (if out my price range) artifacts for sale, including, to name just a few: a 1/2 length wax anatomical Venus in a glass case (pictured second from the top); anatomical models rendered in wax and paper-mâché; various skeletal bits; an original poster advertising a popular anatomical museum (5th from the top); medical instruments; rare (and remarkably intact!) optical toy kits; and a wide array of antique medical books with astounding illustrations, which the shopkeeper, who kindly allowed me to take photographs, enthusiastically displayed for me.

Those of you unable to make it to Paris to check out this shop are in luck; Librairie Alain Brieux and some of their best merchandise are coming to New York City for the Antiquarian Book Fair, which will run from April 3-5th at the The Park Avenue Armory. I am promised they will have some really great stuff with them; I, for one, plan to go and check it out!

You can find out more about the book fair (where Alain Brieux will exhibiting in booth B5) by clicking here. To see more photos cataloging the many and various wonders of this shop, click here. You can check out their still-under-construction website, where you an also download PDFs of their catalogs, by clicking here.

Now, my French is not so good (0k, basically nonexistent) but to the best I can figure, this is the last surviving fragment of the once famed cabinet of Bonnier de la Mosson. This collection is discussed at length by Celeste Olalquiaga in a piece entitled Object Lesson / Transitional Object which ran in a 2005 issue of Cabinet magazine. Here is an excerpt from that piece, which discusses the original cabinet of Bonnier de la Mosson at great length:

Hidden away in the endless folds of Paris’s Jardin des Plantes, the Cabinet Bonnier de la Mosson stands as a unique manifestation of the intersection between aesthetics and science. Dating back to 1735, this luxurious cabinet, amassed and exhibited thanks to a family fortune based on the procurement of regional taxes, has the rare quality of combining the atmospheric mise-en-scène of the preceding Wunderkammern with the organizational intent of the later cabinets, producing an original blend of system and fantasy. Considered by many the richest and most imaginative French cabinet of the early eighteenth century, this curiosity cabinet was housed in the hôtel particulier, as the city residences of aristocrats and royalty were known, of Joseph Bonnier de la Mosson (1702-1744), located in the now extinct rue des Dominiques...

Olalquiaga's is the only in-depth piece in English I have found on the collection, and I am still unsure if this cabinet I photographed in the bibliotèque is recreation, fragment, or a curator's fantasy of what the original might have looked like. If any of you French-enabled folk out there could translate the explanatory label for me (click here), I would be most appreciative, and will post an addendum to this post with the new information.

For now, the images will have to do. You can see the full set of image I took by clicking here (and I urge you to do so--there is so much that is wonderful about this cabinet, but only so many images I can fit on this post). You can read Olalquiaga's article for Cabinet by clicking here.

ADDENDUM: James G. Mundie, who you might remember from this recent post, has just posted a translation.

The caption seems to imply the original cabinet was dismantled in 1935, then restored and 'definitively' reinstalled in the library in 1979. One presumes it was preserved relatively intact in the intervening decades. the cases seem to be original, so perhaps the object placement isn't that far off. I wish I had known this was there when I at the Jardin des Plantes last year.

Thanks, James!

ADDENDUM 2: Translation from an anonymous comment:

Bonnier de la Maison Cabinet

These wooden cases were acquired by Buffon in 1744 when they were auctioned off following the death of Bonnier de la Maison, an extremely knowledgeable amateur scientist and connoisseur of art.

They were installed in the King's Garden Room.

Inside these five units made from Dutch wood decorated with serpents a collection of preserved ["dried"] animals.

Disassembled in 1935, they were installed permanently in the museum's central library in 1979.

Friend of Morbid Anatomy Ky Olsen has just sent me a wonderful link: it seems the Fortean Times (in this month's "Dead & Buried?" issue!) has published a story about "Blythe House"--the storehouse that holds artifacts of the Henry Wellcome collection not currently on display at either the Science Museum or the Wellcome Collection. Called "Medical Cabinet of Curiosities," the piece is a sort of lyrical ode to the overstuffed storehouse, also memorably paid homage to by The Brothers Quay in their short film "The Phantom Museum." I only wish there were more photographs of the backrooms to accompany the piece, but alas. Words will have to do.

Here are some of those words, from the article (with the original links intact):

Most of the medical history objects crammed into Blythe House’s cupboards and jostling for space on its shelves come from the collection of the pharmacist and philanthropist Henry Wellcome (1853-1936), and the air of barely contained chaos seems somehow to bear the echo of his exuberant, omnivorous delight in things. In the surgery room, lines of near-identical scalpels and tonsil guillotines are marshalled in drawerfuls of menace; nestling nearby are materials and skull fragments used in experiments by an English doctor interested in Neolithic trepenation; German WWI cotton wool is bundled in corners; surgeons’ ornate walking sticks hang over high shelves, lasting testimony to the status anxiety of their owners. Locked up in the drugs room are the antidote cases and medicine chests sent by the publicity-savvy and lionizing Wellcome on famous adventurers’ expeditions to Everest or Brazil or the Antarctic, and thousands of jars of exotically strange natural medicines collected from around the world and inscribed with apothecary-evoking legends like ‘East Indian Blistering Fly’ or ‘Dragon’s Blood’. The room of x-ray machines crosses an eccentric inventor’s workshop with a torture chamber, and contains oddities like the Pedoscope, left-over from the days when irradiation seemed a fun way to fit shoes, and early MRI brain scan equipment disguised as Jedi helmets so as not to scare the children...

Click here to read the whole article--well worth checking out! Click here to see David Pescovitz's post on BoingBoing about the article. Visit the Science Museum's infinitely browsable "Brought To Life" website, which makes this entire collection available via beautiful photos and accessible information (and from which the above image is drawn), by clicking here. For more about the Science Museum and the Wellcome Collection, see a recent Morbid Anatomy post by clicking here.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Following is a guest post--or plea, really!--from Mike Sappol, author of the wonderful A Traffic of Dead Bodies(Princeton UP, 2002):

In a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, I came across this quote from Guy de Maupassant:

" ...when you listen to people talking... It seems to me that I'm looking into their ghastly souls and discovering a monstrous fetus preserved in alcohol."--Afloat (Sur l'eau) (1888)

Which got me thinking: Morbid A concentrates on visual evidence, but it's also good to collect literary and other historical references to anatomical specimens and dissections (which are evidence of how things morbid and anatomical were received and conceived and used). So here's a standing project for Morbid A subscribers and lurkers: If anyone out there has a quote relating to things anatomical, whether it's an anatomical image, metaphor or detailed description of an anatomical object or activity, send it on in to Morbid A (with as much citational information as you can stand to provide), for distribution to the morbid anatomical masses.Anatomically and morbidly best, Mike

So! If anyone out there knows of any such quotations, please email them to me at morbidanatomy@gmail.com or enter them as comments on this post. I promise to collect and post the best of the lot!

Image: Rossiter, Frederick Magee, The practical guide to health; a popular treatise on anatomy, physiology, and hygiene, with a scientific description of diseases, their causes and treatment, designed for nurses and for home use. Washington, DC: Review & Herald Pub. Assn. [c1908] p. 46; Courtesy the National Library of Medicine

Morbid Anatomy presents at Observatory:"Italian Wax Anatomical Models in European Collections"Marie Dauenheimer, Trustee of the Vesalius Trust and Medical IllustratorFriday, April 3rdDoors open at 7:00; Presentation at 7:30 PM

This illustrated presentation will examine the art and history of the wax anatomical models of the “Museo Zoologico La Specola” in Florence, Italy. Over 2,000 wax models of human anatomy were created by the museum's “Wax Modeling Workshop” from the mid 18th to early 19th century, and the products of their labor--best known to modern audiences through Tachen's Encyclopaedia Anatomica--are considered by many to be the finest anatomical waxworks in the world.

This presentation will address how and why these anatomical masterpieces were created, the artists and anatomists who created them, and the place of these collections in the history of anatomical art. The wax anatomical models of Bologna, which pre-date those of “La Specola,” will also discussed.

Marie Dauenheimer is a board-certified Medical Illustrator living in the Washington D.C. area. She is also a trustee on the board of the Vesalius Trust, a non-profit organization which works to support education and research in medical illustration and related visual communication professions. Marie leads the Vesalius Trust Art and Anatomy tours, which are educational tours of important anatomical museums throughout the world. This year's tour--from October 27 to November 8th--will feature museums in Florence (including "La Specola"), Bologna, Venice, and Padua; for more information about this tour, click here. You can see some of Marie's work by clicking here.

Practical Details"Italian Wax Anatomical Models in European Collections"Marie Dauenheimer, Trustee of the Vesalius Trust and Medical IllustratorFriday, April 3rdDoors open at 7:00; Presentation at 7:30 PMAdmission: FreeLocation: Observatory543 Union Street (at Nevins) Brooklyn, New York 11215Entry via Proteus Gowanus Interdisciplinary Gallery and Reading Room; go through back door of gallery, then take a left to find event. Directions here or call 718.243.1572.

To learn more about Observatory, click here; you can also visit our under-construction website by clicking here. To get on mailing list, or if you if you might be interested in presenting an event in the future, email me by clicking here.

Monday, March 23, 2009

Just a friendly reminder that tomorrow night--Tuesday, March 24th--Kathryn A. Hoffman will be presenting her illustrated lecture "Reveries of Sleeping Beauty: Slumber and Death in Anatomical Museums, Fairground Shows, and Art" at Observatory. Hope you can make it! Full details below, for your convenience. Oh, and I should mention. There will also be wine.

P.S. If you'd like to get a taste of the delights that await you tomorrow night, check out Bioephemera's wonderful post "Invading Hands, Sleeping Beauties," inspired by a similarly themed Hoffman lecture, by clicking here.

Morbid Anatomy Presents at Observatory"Reveries of Sleeping Beauty: Slumber and Death in Anatomical Museums, Fairground Shows, and Art "Kathryn A. Hoffmann, University of Hawaii at ManoaTuesday March, 24th at 7:30 PM (Door open at 7:00)Free of Charge

This illustrated talk will follow the paths of sleeping beauties: lovely young women who lie on silk sheeted beds in glass cases in anatomical museums and fairground shows, who recline on sofas in Belgian train stations, and sometimes in the middle of streets. Often the women were nude. Sometimes they were adorned with a piece of jewelry or a bow, and sometimes they wore white dresses. One breathed gently in a glass case on a fairground verandah for nearly a century. Others lay quietly in caskets under flowers. Some were wax, some were real, some were dead, and some merely pretended to be dead. Sometimes, in the imagination of artists like the surrealist Paul Delvaux, they got up and walked about; pretty somnambulists wandering through natural history museums, arcades and streets, through modern cities and ancient Alexandria, Ephesus, and Rhodes.

Using photographs, posters, advertisements, and paintings, the talk will follow models known as “Anatomical Venuses” through one of the great wax anatomical museums of the world (La Specola in Florence) and an extraordinarily long-lived popular museum that traveled the fairground routes of Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Pierre Spitzner’s Great Anatomical and Ethnological Museum). It will take side trips into some of the visual worlds the Venuses drew from or helped inspire, including fairground sleeping beauty acts, morgue shows, mortuary photography, reliquary displays, and art. In the paths of the sleeping beauties, it is clear that death and slumber, pedagogy and entertainment, science and reverie long shared strange borders.

Kathryn A. Hoffmann is the author of books and numerous articles on the body, including “Sleeping Beauties in the Fairground.” She is Professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where she teaches courses on anomalous bodies and the histories of medicine and the fairground. She has received awards for her writing, and lectures frequently for associations, libraries, and museums in the fields of the history of medicine, literature, and art.

Practical Details"Reveries of Sleeping Beauty: Slumber and Death in Anatomical Museums, Fairground Shows, and Art "Kathryn A. Hoffmann, University of Hawaii at ManoaTuesday March, 24th at 7:30 PM (Door open at 7:00)Admission: FreeObservatory, 543 Union Street (at Nevins) Brooklyn, New York 11215Entry via Proteus Gowanus Interdisciplinary Gallery and Reading Room; go through back door of gallery, then take a left to find event. Directions here or call 718.243.1572.

Really quite interesting! This segment of the Discovery Channel's "How It's Made" series is about contemporary, resin-based anatomical models, but touches briefly on wax anatomical models and the history of the form. You might be surprised to see how little has changed in model manufacture from the times of Auzoux to today, ie. how much is still done by hand; I suppose this explains the fact that they are never cheap to come by! You can view the episode segment by clicking here.

Found via a very interesting post about anatomical model production on Illustration Revealed blog; click here to visit that post.

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

I know that I have already informally done so (recent post here) but I would like to take this opportunity to formally introduce a new project undertaken by 6 like-minded folk and myself.

Observatory, as we are calling it, is a small room located between Proteus Gowanus Interdisciplinary Gallery and Reading Room, the Cabinet Magazine headquarters, and the Morbid Anatomy Library at 543 Union Street on the lovely Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, New York. The collaborators include myself, the inscrutable G. F. Newland, Michelle Enemark and Dylan Thuras of the Curious Expeditions blog, Pam Grossman of Phantasmaphile, Herbert Pfostl of Blind Pony Books and Paper Graveyard, and video and book artist James Walsh. Plans for Observatory are broad and many (as you can imagine, what with 7 people involved!), and thus far include lectures (such as the one you are about to read about), screenings, exhibitions, book-release parties, classes, symposia, and spectacles of various other kinds. The very-soon-to-be-launched website will soon be perusable (and sign-upable!) at observatoryroom.org; stay tuned for more on that front. But now, here is information about an upcoming event that Morbid Anatomy is presenting at Observatory. Hope to see you there!

Morbid Anatomy Presents at Observatory"Reveries of Sleeping Beauty: Slumber and Death in Anatomical Museums, Fairground Shows, and Art "Kathryn A. Hoffmann, University of Hawaii at ManoaTuesday March, 24th at 7:30 PM (Door open at 7:00)Free of Charge

This illustrated talk will follow the paths of sleeping beauties: lovely young women who lie on silk sheeted beds in glass cases in anatomical museums and fairground shows, who recline on sofas in Belgian train stations, and sometimes in the middle of streets. Often the women were nude. Sometimes they were adorned with a piece of jewelry or a bow, and sometimes they wore white dresses. One breathed gently in a glass case on a fairground verandah for nearly a century. Others lay quietly in caskets under flowers. Some were wax, some were real, some were dead, and some merely pretended to be dead. Sometimes, in the imagination of artists like the surrealist Paul Delvaux, they got up and walked about; pretty somnambulists wandering through natural history museums, arcades and streets, through modern cities and ancient Alexandria, Ephesus, and Rhodes.

Using photographs, posters, advertisements, and paintings, the talk will follow models known as “Anatomical Venuses” through one of the great wax anatomical museums of the world (La Specola in Florence) and an extraordinarily long-lived popular museum that traveled the fairground routes of Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Pierre Spitzner’s Great Anatomical and Ethnological Museum). It will take side trips into some of the visual worlds the Venuses drew from or helped inspire, including fairground sleeping beauty acts, morgue shows, mortuary photography, reliquary displays, and art. In the paths of the sleeping beauties, it is clear that death and slumber, pedagogy and entertainment, science and reverie long shared strange borders.

Kathryn A. Hoffmann is the author of books and numerous articles on the body, including “Sleeping Beauties in the Fairground.” She is Professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where she teaches courses on anomalous bodies and the histories of medicine and the fairground. She has received awards for her writing, and lectures frequently for associations, libraries, and museums in the fields of the history of medicine, literature, and art.

Practical Details"Reveries of Sleeping Beauty: Slumber and Death in Anatomical Museums, Fairground Shows, and Art "Kathryn A. Hoffmann, University of Hawaii at ManoaTuesday March, 24th at 7:30 PM (Door open at 7:00)Admission: FreeObservatory, 543 Union Street (at Nevins) Brooklyn, New York 11215Entry via Proteus Gowanus Interdisciplinary Gallery and Reading Room; go through back door of gallery, then take a left to find event. Directions here or call 718.243.1572.

Feel free to email me at morbidanatomy@gmail.com with any questions. Note: I have seen Hoffman speak on this topic, and I can assure you--this is a lecture not to be missed!

Saturday, March 14, 2009

I highly encourage you to click on this image; the details are rather amazing. Keep an eye out for Hitler, and a Botero self-portrait. More about this image on Ciao Anita!'s Flickr photostream, from whence it came.

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Some of you might remember my recent post on the mysterious formalin preserved animals. I just received affirmation from Simon Chaplin, Director of the Museum and Special Collections at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, that they are, indeed, photographs of specimens in his collection.

Chaplin tell us that these photographs are "the work of Elaine Duigenan, from her project 'Mysteries of Generation'. The specimens are from the Hunterian Museum at The Royal College of Surgeons in London - all are from the collection of John Hunter, and were made between 1760 and 1793. There are images of all 3,600 specimens online here - though not the same quality as Elaine's photographs!"

Above are some additional images by Duigenan from the same series. And here is what she had to say about this 'Mysteries of Generation' series, from her website:

MYSTERIES OF GENERATION

Preserver (french) - to keep safe, to keep in existence

The images were taken over the course of three years at the Royal College of Surgeons, London. They are of 200 year old animal specimens which were preserved by pioneer anatomist John Hunter (1728 - 1793).

“For me, photography has become an ‘act of preservation’ and objects I focus on become the locators or igniters of memory. The traces and remnants we find in any landscape can spark recognition. They can even invoke a presence.”

I have posted more of her images of the collection above; you can see more by on her website by clicking here. Also, you can view and learn about all 3,600 specimens in the Hunterian Collection (thanks, Simon! This was a resource I did not know about!) by clicking here.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

I just received a very excited email from my friend Marie; it seems that an ecorché by Honoré Fragonard--18th Century maker of anatomical art objects from dehydrated human specimens-- made it onto the cover of the Sunday travel section of the Washington Post!

I have not (yet!) been able to find a copy of the original hard-copy of the paper (anyone out there with a scanner of a digi cam want to send me a copy?), but above are some image of Fragonard's work, from the website of the Musée Fragonard del'EcolevétérinairedeMaisons-Alfort , which is the museum discussed in the story. Here is the excerpt, from Blake Gopnik's "A Brush With The Paris Art Scene: Out-of-the-Way Sites Show Off The Avant-Garde Side of the City" as it appeared in Sunday's Post:

Once in Alfort, we headed toward a complex of charmingly shabby neoclassical buildings and stables, complete with bored-looking horses lounging in a round courtyard, and climbed some ancient stairs to take in works by Fragonard. No, not Jean-Honoré Fragonard, the great painter of ancien-regime bliss. Antoine had led me to Alfort's 250-year-old National Veterinary School (second oldest in the world) to take in the handiwork of that painter's cousin, plain old Honoré Fragonard, the school's founding director and a pioneer in the "art" of the flayed body.

Fragonard's skinned and preserved humans, with veins and nerves picked out in different colors, were on display in the newly renovated rooms of the school's tiny museum, alongside giant bovine tumors and cases full of diseased horses' hoofs. With the exception of the museum's vintage architecture and casework, now polished to a shine, none of this was what you'd call elegant. But that was just the point of the visit: to get a taste of French culture that Americans don't get at the Phillips Collection or the Barnes. This Fragonard's skill fits into a tradition of rational investigation that has deep roots in France (Pasteur, anyone? Marie Curie?) but that our romantic image of Seine-side lovers tends to slight...

And all this 200 years before Gunther vonHagens (though the careful eye might spot just a few similarities...)! Truly, the more things change, the more they say the same.

You can read the whole story on the Washington Post website, here. You can visit the Musée Fragonard del'EcolevétérinairedeMaisons-Alfort Website to learn more about (and see more of!) this collection by clicking here. You can also see some old photos I took of the collection (with a very bad camera!) here.

Oh! P.S. I will have a few days in Paris next week; does anybody have any recommendations for must-see collections?

Images: Top, The Horseman of the Apocalypse (1766-1771); The Man with a Mandible (1766 - 1771); Human Foetuses Dancing a Gig, all images from the Musée Fragonard del'EcolevétérinairedeMaisons-Alfort Website.

Monday, March 9, 2009

Above is a wonderful series of pathological portraits plucked from the Wellcome Library's extensive "Gentlefolk of Leeds Afflicted with Disease" Collection, (sic) and featured on the Wellcome Library Blog today. The portraits, both from around 1820, depict a Mrs. Bennett before-and-after undergoing a skin disease cure. The first portrait, showing her in the full subjection to her disease, is entitled, eloquently, "Mrs Bennett. Disease from 1818 to 1821". The second portrait, showcasing her complete recovery, is entitled, with equal flair, "Under Cure From 1818 to 1821."

See full story by clicking here. You can peruse the whole fascinating Wellcome Library Blog by clicking here. More on the fantastic, amazing, utterly entralling Wellcome Collection in these recent posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).

The Museum of Funeral Customs in Springfield, Illinois, is under threat of closure, as documented in an article that ran in yesterday's New York Times.

The museum, founded in 1999 and located just outside the cemetery that houses Abraham Lincoln's much-visited tomb, features (per Wikipedia) "a re-created 1920s embalming room; coffins and funeral paraphernalia from various cultures and times; examples of post-mortem photography; and a scale model of Lincoln's funeral train" in an attempt to document the evolution of the funeral industry in America from the mid 19th century to the present.

Sadly, as the article explains, the museum has never drawn the number of visitors required for the museums survival, despite its tourist-friendly location; the recession has only made things more dire. The Museum of Funeral Customs (which is the second largest funerary history museum in America--the National Museum of Funeral History in Houston is the largest) is now facing a very real possibility of closure; it has recently ceased regular hours and is open by appointment only. The director, Duane Marsh (above, seated on the horse-drawn hearse), is determined to find a way to keep the museum afloat, but it is unclear at this moment how the museum might be saved. I have not heard about any "save the museum" efforts happening; if anyone knows of any such efforts, please let Morbid Anatomy know.

You can read the original story on the New York Times website here and view the New York Times Slideshow (from which all but the bottom image are drawn) here. Another interesting article about the museum's troubles from can be found in a local newspaper here. You can find out more about the museum on Roadside America (here) or Wikipdedia (here). The museum's website seems to have expired and is no longer operational.

Thanks, John Troyer (Death and Dying Practices Associate, Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath) and G. Swett for bringing this story to my attention.Images: Top photos from the New York Times "Funeral Museum Struggles to Stay Alive" Slideshow, photographed by Kristen Schmid Schurter for The New York Times. Bottom image: Wikipedia Commons